In computer science, an object can be characterized as an individual unit of run-time data storage that can be used as the basic building block of programs. Objects are often identified by identifiers that can consist of multiple components. Such identifiers are referred to as composite identifiers and because such composite identifiers refer to multiple components, such identifiers, in the aggregate, can consume significant amounts of database storage. In addition, if objects with large composite identifiers are frequently referenced, then the total memory consumption of the corresponding composite identifiers can hamper system performance.
Some conventional techniques have adopted hash value based short identifiers to reduce the memory consumption. However, hash values have the characteristic of being evenly dispersed in the related value range. Thus, a grouping of objects that is given by one or more components of the composite identifier cannot be preserved. Assuming that the processing of objects is often group related, reading a group of objects in a database means reading in the complete value range of the hash values, which makes page based caching techniques at the database inefficient.